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The Unfinished Garden (2012)

by Barbara Claypole White(Favorite Author)

3.75 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

077831412X (ISBN13: 9780778314127)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Harlequin MIRA

review 1: Tilly is a gardener, a widow with a young child. She loves to dig and plant, and walk through weeds and tangle. She also likes to push away affection as punishment for the guilt she feels for her husband's death. Enter a stranger, James, who changes everything. What I appreciated most about this story was the author's ability to get inside James' struggle with life-stopping OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder),and the impact this disorder has on how he lives and loves. The scourge of James' perfectionism reveals a messy, deeply pained yet beautiful person inside. Tilly, the very opposite of James or is she, offers something James hasn't allowed for himself. In this story, the author defies labels and avoids heavy-handed psychologizing. Instead, she takes the reader inside a... more gentle mind struggling daily with the onslaught of a brain gone wild. Together, Tilly and James negotiate their damaged selves via the endless possibilities of an unfinished garden, and arrive at something unexpected.
review 2: I received this book free from Reading Group Guides. If I had known it was a Harlequin I would not have requested a copy of it. The folks at Reading Group Guides are so generous with their wonderful books and this is the first I have not liked. But I am not a fan of pure romance. Mix some mystery in and I may well enjoy in but pure romance... not so much. This was a Harlequin so pure romance. I thought perhaps the OCD angle would save it. (I trained to be a therapist at one time so this intrigued me.) James' OCD and Tilly's grieving widow status could have led to some really good emotional scenes. But they were never really together long enough to make it work for me. I found Rowena and Sebastian to be minor distractions. None of the characters really had enough emotional depth for me. less

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